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06 September 2015 12:51 AM

Actually we can’t do what we like with this country. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged.It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves. Every one of the posturing notables simpering ‘refugees welcome’ should be asked if he or she will take a refugee family into his or her home for an indefinite period, and pay for their food, medical treatment and education. If so, they mean it. If not, they are merely demanding that others pay and make room so that they can experience a self-righteous glow. No doubt the same people are also sentimental enthusiasts for the ‘living wage’, and ‘social housing’, when in fact open borders are steadily pushing wages down and housing costs up.As William Blake rightly said: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.’Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can’t get to. Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it’s like to live without the shield of the sea. There is no positive word for ‘safety’ in Russian. Their word for security is ‘bezopasnost’ – ‘without danger’.Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away.Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories. Newcomers can learn them, but only if they come in small enough numbers. Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us.So now, on the basis of an emotional spasm, dressed up as civilisation and generosity, are we going to say that we abandon this legacy and decline our obligation to pass it on, like the enfeebled, wastrel heirs of an ancient inheritance letting the great house and the estate go to ruin?Having seen more than my share of real corpses, and watched children starving to death in a Somali famine, I am not unmoved by pictures of a dead child on a Turkish beach. But I am not going to pretend to be more upset than anyone else. Nor am I going to suddenly stop thinking, as so many people in the media and politics appear to have done. The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.I’ll go further. The use of words such as ‘desperate’ is quite wrong in this case. The child’s family were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic. Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child’s body was washed up. It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living. Goodness knows I have done what I could on this page to oppose the stupid interventions by this country in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which have turned so many innocent people into refugees or corpses. But I can see neither sense nor justice in allowing these things to become a pretext for an unstoppable demographic revolution in which Europe (including, alas, our islands) merges its culture and its economy with North Africa and the Middle East. If we let this happen, Europe would lose almost all the things that make others want to live there. You really think these crowds of tough young men chanting ‘Germany!’ in the heart of Budapest are ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘refugees’? Refugees don’t confront the police of the countries in which they seek sanctuary. They don’t chant orchestrated slogans or lie across the train tracks. And why, by the way, do they use the English name for Germany when they chant? In Arabic and Turkish, that country is called ‘Almanya’, in Kurdish something similar. The Germans themselves call it ‘Deutschland’. In Hungarian, it’s ‘Nemetorszag’.Did someone hope that British and American TV would be there? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: spontaneous demonstrations take a lot of organising. Refugees don’t demand or choose their refuge. They ask and they hope. When we become refugees one day (as we may well do), we will discover this.As to what those angry, confident and forceful young men actually are, I’ll leave you to work it out, as I am too afraid of the Thought Police to use what I think is the correct word. But it is interesting that this week sees the publication in English of a rather dangerous book, which came out in France just before the Charlie Hebdo murders.Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, prophesies a Muslim-dominated government in France about seven years from now, ushered into power by the French Tory and Labour parties. What they want, says one of the cleverer characters in the book, ‘is for France to disappear – to be integrated into a European federation’. This means they’d much rather do a deal with a Muslim party than with the National Front, France’s Ukip equivalent. If any of this sounds familiar to you, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s amazing how likely and simple the author makes this Islamic revolution sound. Can we stop this transformation of all we have and are? I doubt it. To do so would involve the grim-faced determination of Australia, making it plain in every way that our doors are open only to limited numbers of people, chosen by us, enduring the righteous scorn of the supposedly enlightened. As we lack the survival instinct and the determination necessary, and as so many of our most influential people are set on committing a sentimental national suicide, I suspect we won’t.To those who condemn reasonable calls for national self-defence as bigotry, hatred and intolerance (which they are not), I make only this request: just don’t pretend you’re doing a good and generous thing, when you’re really cowardly and weak.

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08 September 2014 4:52 PM

Very well then, let us talk about Scottish Independence. But please, let us do it thoughtfully. I really do not think that my views on this subject will influence anyone north of the border, and don’t see why they should.

Nor am I as distressed as I probably ought to be about the possibility of a Scottish secession. The main thing that annoys me about the prospect is that it might just save the Tory party from what would otherwise be unavoidable and well-deserved slow death.

In a parliament from which Scottish MPs had been removed, the Tories could win a majority, not through any merit, but simply because a large number of their opponents had vanished. It is the only way the Tories ever could win a Westminster majority again.

One has to wonder if the Tory Party’s notably feeble defence of the Union has something to do with this fact.

Anyway, back to the deep subject of the splitting of the United Kingdom:

Many years ago I was interviewed by Adam Boulton of Sky News about what was then my new (and first) book ‘The Abolition of Britain’, published after some difficulty but attracting a certain amount of attention.

Mr Boulton had at first assumed that the theme of the book was devolution, then getting under way thanks to the Blairites’ unprincipled decision to try to head off Welsh and Scottish nationalism ( growing threat to their own party) by encouraging local parliaments. That went well, didn’t it?

As it happens, I don’t think I did more than touch on the subject (I am currently recording an audio-version of ‘Abolition of Britain’, and have so far not noticed any mention of it at all).

Of course it wasn’t about that at all. Those few who have read it (rather than the hostile reviews of it from which most people have formed their opinions) will know that it’s a series of essays about how deep moral and cultural changes in Britain were achieved or came about. The links between these essays are that these changes, added together, amounted to a cultural revolution as devastating as that which convulsed China during the same period – but without the violence, and so largely unnoticed.

It is mostly unpolitical, in the party sense, though it contains some rather tinny reflections on the Euro and the approaching general election in which this was expected to be an important issue( it wasn’t , as it happened) . If I rewrote the book now, I’d remove these, as they subtract from it.

in which he reflects, generously :‘About 15 years ago people such as John Redwood and Peter Hitchens produced books called The End of Britain or The Abolition of Britain. They saw the principal threat as coming from the EU, I think; and though they were obviously right to be concerned about the erosion of sovereignty, I don’t think either of them expected the constitutional annihilation of the country. Now those book titles look prophetic, frankly.’

I can’t speak for Mr Redwood, who bafflingly remains in the Tory Party, shunted insultingly into a remote siding and cut off from any position of importance.

But I’d say that while I didn’t expect this in detail, I was pretty much prepared for anything. You see, I’d seen catastrophe in Moscow in the early 1990s, and I knew that countries can fall apart far faster than people think they can, especially countries which are, in essence, federations. Shortly before I went to work in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin began to assert the existence of Russia as distinct from the USSR. I remember talking to British diplomatic experts on the Soviet Union, and asking what the rules permitted, and how far it could go. They were unsure, and reasonably regarded my speculations about frontiers and control of law-making and armed forces as premature. So it seemed then. But not for long.

After the 1991 putsch, I watched many of my wildest speculations take solid shape with amazing speed. I recall a trip in autumn 1991 to the Estonia-Russia border between Narva and Ivangorod, a picturesque setting in which twin castles glare at each other across the water, and being able to cross the bridge between two increasingly separate countries, with minimal formalities. It seemed a bit of a joke to me and my Muscovite colleague (though the Estonians gave him – but not me – a bit of trouble on the way back) . Within a few months it had hardened into a proper guarded frontier, as had many others which had for decades been no more than a forgotten line on a map.

The departure of Ukraine, within absurd borders, was one of those wild speculations (What, we all wondered, would happen to the Crimea, so very Russian yet ‘given’ to Ukraine by Krushchev in a thoughtless gesture). And we see the consequences to this day.

As usual, in the Cassandra zone of combined prophecy and powerlessness in which I live and move and have my being, I sometimes fall victim to the desire to pronounce on what should be done about current events, and set out manifestoes and prescriptions despite having no power or influence, and no means at all to insert my ideas into the sprockets, chains and cogwheels of power.

This, I suspect, is because I resent being no more than a safety valve for other disenfranchised people, whose frustration and rage are assuaged because I express them on public platforms, and yearn to have some actual effect.

But – as I now openly recognize - all reliable indicators suggest that I am on the losing side in all major moral, cultural and political battles, and am likely to remain there until I die. My books and articles may sometimes call faintly for action, but in general they are just the last rites pronounced over the corpse of my country, muttered mainly as an act of commemoration.

If I could find a publisher now, I would try to combine all my books so far into one, under the title ‘The Obituary of Britain’.

I admit I didn’t think devolution would lead so rapidly to what we see now. It was only later that I grasped the key thing about it – that it is an aspect of the EU threat, rightly mentioned by Mr Johnson.

It was Ireland that first made me aware of the EU’s involvement in the break-up of the United Kingdom. I recall during an Irish general election in the 1980s suddenly realising that the EU provided a flag under which Dublin could become genuinely independent of London, and a flag under which a deal might be done over Northern Ireland, a deal which somehow bypassed the great wall of Unionism. But it was only a foggy apprehension. The later creation of the Euro, and all that has followed, seem to me to have made it seem sharper and more real.

About the same time, I became aware that the European Parliament had published a map (I still have a copy somewhere) of the whole EU, showing regional boundaries in every country. It had two key points of interest.

One was that, of all the countries of the UK, England was the only one subdivided into ‘regions’ with romantic, faraway names rooted in our history, such as ‘South East’. In fact, the map of England showed only these regions, though most English residents are unaware of their existence, and have the vaguest idea of which one they inhabit. The counties were of course unmentioned. The word ‘England’ did not appear anywhere on it. This truthful expression of the EU’s real attitude was later ‘corrected’ after protests. The correction was less honest than the original. Modern EU maps carry the word ‘England’, though there is in fact no such political unit, nor does the EU (or anyone else in power) ever intend there to be.

Scotland and Wales, meanwhile, were not cut up into regions at all, though in fact there are very distinct regional differences within both of them

The other was the EU recognized two separate sets of borders in Ireland. It marked the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but it also marked (just as clearly) the four historic provinces, of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connaught. I don’t think there was anything comparable on the map, outside the British Isles

This, taken together, looked to me like a challenge. The EU was saying that its idea of federation on this patch of soil was different from the UK’s idea. It envisaged Ireland as an island in the EU, destined to become four regions under Brussels, in which Dublin would fade into mere symbolism, a sentimental capital rather than a real one; whereas we envisaged Ireland as an island containing two distinct entities - a UK province called ‘Northern Ireland’ and an independent sovereign state called ‘the Irish Republic’.

The EU, as Sinn Fein alone has recognized, was therefore as much of a threat to genuine Irish independence as Britain.

On John Bull’s other Island, Scotland and Wales would be permitted to have sentimental symbols of nationalism – they would be called ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’, have capitals and flags, maybe even token armed forces and national assemblies with limited powers, and governments ( after all, Luxembourg has all these things) . But their true unsentimental status would be as regions of the EU, the equivalents of the French Aquitaine or the German Brandenburg, again owing ultimate fealty to Brussels.

When the EU used to end at the river Oder, on the bridge between Slubice and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, I recall the interesting signage as one drove Westwards. First, I think, there was blue and yellow sign saying ‘Welcome to the EU’. Then you saw a rather grand one saying ‘Welcome to Brandenburg’, and eventually a tiny little blink-and-you’ve-missed-it thing in the bushes saying rather squeakily ’Welcome to Germany’. The EU and regional signs may have been the other way round, but it doesn’t matter. It was the insignificance of the ‘Germany’ sign that I thought most interesting. The nation I was entering (using my EU passport, as the British one had been abolished) was not Germany but the EU. The province was Brandenburg. Germany was a memory, an interlude between 1870 and 1989, to be allowed to fade away in time. The sense that the end of the Cold War meant the triumph of the EU was also very strong. I think that understanding is essential to grasping recent developments in Ukraine.

for providing useful notes on US Secretary of State James Baker’s own accounts of his 1990 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he wrote :’NATO, whose juris[diction] would not move eastward’, plus an account of a letter Baker wrote at the time to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, also saying he had offered the USSR ‘ assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its current jurisdiction’.

I have never doubted that such assurances were given. Mr Stroilov, in an effort of journalistic stretching so great it almost qualifies as Pilates Yoga, says that this can’t be right, as he cannot find any Russian records of such assurances in the Soviet records he has seen. One might suggest that perhaps they are somewhere in records he has not seen, that Mr baker would have been unlikely to have made this up and that Mikhail Gorbachev was far from the only Soviet official dealing with the USA at the time, though he may have been among the more naïve of them, as his general record shows. Mr Stroilov also manages to take seriously what is obviously a provocative Gorbachev speculation about Russia itself joining NATO, a self-evidently absurd idea which has never been remotely likely.

I am not digressing here, though I know it looks like it. The re-ordering of European frontiers is what we are talking about, and even the fate of Scotland is bound up in the same story as the Ukraine crisis, the Georgian and Moldovan border disputes, the Kosovo secession, the Cyprus partition, the splitting of the Czech republic and Slovakia and perhaps above all the break-up of what was once Yugoslavia.

Even Vladimir Putin’s attempt to impose a different federal structure on Ukraine is a sort of mirror of EU tactics. If he can make the Ukrainian provinces more autonomous and less dependent on Kiev, he can also make borders between the east and the centre more significant, so increasing Moscow’s power over the east, and over the whole of Ukraine. If he does this, which is plainly his aim, he wins twice. Not only does he enable open Russian influence in the Don basin.

He can count on such an arrangement accentuating the borders between Kiev and the far West, and so promoting strife there. This will not necessarily be hard, as the nationalist militias, now well-armed and battle-hardened, will not take kindly to being stood down by President Poroshenko, and his own official forces are weak and demoralized. There could be trouble between Kiev liberals and the (armed and angry) ultra-nationalists who trace their ancestry to Stepan Bandera and the days before 1939 when a large chunk of Ukraine was under Polish rule.

Then there’s the Yugoslav lesson. Another former federation, Yugoslavia was not very like the UK. But it had one similarity. It was a federal state on territory coveted by the EU, but a federation of a very different kind from the EU, centred on Belgrade and with some lingering connections to Moscow. If its orientation was to be changed, and a century-old German/Austrian policy desired that end, then Belgrade had to be nullified. Hence the concentration upon (undoubted) Serb atrocities and the general willingness to forget (equally undoubted) Croatian ones.

There was also the accelerated recognition of Slovenia, so as to return it to its pre-1918 German/Austrian orbit. And there was the 1992 EU recognition of independent Croatia, Roman Catholic and Romanised in faith and alphabet, loyal Habsburg subject until 1918, client of Berlin in 1941-45, invariable foe and rival of Serbia, by contrast Orthodox and Cyrillic in faith and alphabet, ally of Russia, ferocious foe of Vienna in 1914, and of Germany in 1941-45.

None of this outside interference in a former sovereign state ever seems to be counted as an attempt to alter the borders of Europe (though it certainly did) , the thing for which Russia gets into trouble in Crimea and elsewhere. For some reason abolishing borders (normally a sign of conquest) doesn’t seem to get you into the same sort of trouble as shifting them. But of course the EU, as well as advancing (democratically, of course) into many countries where it previously did not rule and abolishing the borders of all Schengen members, has also created borders between the Czech Republic and Slovakia (promptly nullified by Schengen) and between former members of the Yugoslav Federation.

Confronted with people who don’t see how important all this is, or who argue that because the local elites were bounced into rapid support of it, it’s not actually an expansion or a border revision, one is reminded of poor, dim Jemima Puddleduck, who does not suspect the Fox’s intentions towards her even when he mentions his pressing need for Sage and Onion. Those who have not read Beatrix Potter’s powerful fable of naivety versus realism are strongly advised to do so. Charm is all very well, but in the end it can be just as dangerous as naked force.

Anyway, the EU’s intentions towards the United Kingdom are, it seems to me to, encourage the secession of Scotland and Wales, and to encourage the incorporation of Northern Ireland into a four-region, EU dependent Ireland, so diminishing Great Britain and the UK, and then to (how shall I put this?) Balkanize England into ‘Regions’ which will increasingly be oriented towards Brussels and Frankfurt. The recent quiet transformation of London into a sort of presidential republic, multicultural and very separate from England, seems to me to be a key step towards this.

When the process is over, England and Britain will be no more, having no political, legal or economic significance, remembered only in Shakespeare festivals and Morris-dancing.

Without the EU’s enormous challenge to the pre-existing nations of Europe, none of this would be feasible. Alex Salmond would never have been heard of, the SNP still an eccentric gaggle of Gaelic-speaking fanatics, and there would be no referendum approaching. Without the collapse of British patriotism, Protestant, maritime, monarchist, liberty-loving in its bones, a collapse which I documented in 1999, none of this would have been even thinkable. Following that collapse, what force or ideas is there to stop it? Please don’t anybody mention an ‘English Parliament’. The worst thing about this terrible idea is that it might actually come about - some modern-architecture shed in Milton Keynes, in which the ‘regions’ of England are represented by party apparatchiks chosen from closed lists, and are allowed to debate the drainage budget and the number of windmills per hectare.

As it is, the threat of a victory for the ‘yes’ campaign may for the first time alert the people of England and Scotland to the immense scale and importance of the political revolution which has been storming and stamping across Europe from the Atlantic to the River Bug for 50 years now, and shows no sign of ending.

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07 May 2014 2:50 PM

Roger Boyes of ‘The Times’ has now returned from Waitrose (whither he went when he was losing an argument with me about Ukraine) and has drawn to my attention an article he has written for that newspaper, under the restrained and judicious headline ‘The new Mussolini and his axis of the macho. Europe’s nationalists see Putin as an ally. But, as Ukraine shows, he has no respect for borders’.

Lackaday, I cannot link to it for it is behind Mr Rupert Murdoch’s paywall. I can’t even quote any more than small bits of it. But I can mention that it is adorned with a picture of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, posing with fists on hips in a stance of greater-than-usual arrogance. The caption beneath this study runs : ‘Vladimir Putin is a post-fascist, heir to Benito Mussolini, not Joseph Stalin’.

How odd. Why would a caption to a picture of Mussolini *begin* with the words ‘Vladimir Putin’? I can’t think of another example of this practice.

But then again I suppose we must welcome the open-minded, nay, even-handed thinking which has led Mr Boyes or his editor to concede that Vladimir Putin is not Stalin. This is a major step forward, I suppose. For me, it’s simple. Mr Putin has not yet opened a vast archipelago of homicidal labour camps, nor crammed millions of his citizens into them, nor launched a great terror on his people under which anyone may be seized without pretext, and tortured into confessing non-existent crimes before being shot in the back of the head or despatched to a living death in Norilsk. Mr Putin has not deliberately caused a gigantic famine in which millions have died. Mr Putin has not murdered many of his close associates. He has not signed an unscrupulous alliance with Hitler, partitioned Poland, or established an iron secret police despotism over the whole of Central Europe. Nor has he persecuted legitimate scientists, nor has he embarked on anti-semitic purges of doctors. Nor has he encourage a pharaonic personality cult, requiring the erection of thousands of images of him. Nor has he encouraged a cult around a boy (Pavlik Morozov) who betrayed his own parents to the secret police, nor has he compelled his own immediate colleagues to endure in silence the cruel imprisonment of their close family members..

But many at ‘The Times’ and elsewhere in Murdochworld seem to have bought their political telescopes from some strange Iraq War surplus shop. Viewed through these instruments, almost everyone looks like either Stalin or Hitler (depending on the particular crisis involved) . And all kinds of other strange objects can also be seen. Readers of M.R. James’s ghost story ‘A View From A Hill’, will be familiar with the idea of a sinister telescope or field glass which shows the user what dead men’s eyes have seen. The Murdochscope, by contrast, shows you what other men’s minds have mistakenly imagined. Far, far off it can also descry weapons of mass destruction somewhere in the Iraqi desert.

As for ‘respect for borders’, I’m not sure that the neo-conservative globalist movement is very troubled by borders, or entitled to get hoity-toity about them. Apart from supporting their total abolition in continental Europe through Schengen, what about (here I go again) Kosovo and Cyprus, anyone? Or, come to that, Iraq, now shorn for all intents and purposes of Iraqi Kurdistan, a ‘western’ protectorate. If airspace counts as a border, Libya also deserves a mention.

Mr Putin, as often discussed here, is no paragon. He is indeed a man of many very bad faults, and his state is corrupt and violent. But to mention him in the same breath as Stalin is simply to betray a complete lack of the sense of proportion.

And Mr Boyes is intelligent enough not to do that, just as he really ought to know that Moscow has referred to itself as the third Rome for many centuries. But Mussolini? According to Mr Boyes, Mr Putin is a ‘post-fascist, an heir to Benito Mussolini’. But apart from using such phrases as ‘right wing’ and such expressions as ‘nationalist’, which thought-free left-wingers employ to win the plaudits of their friends without actually having to explain the assumed wickedness of these positions, there’s really very little to justify either headline or picture. Mussolini and Putin really do not have that much in common and nor (alas for Russia) does Russia have much in common with Italy.

Instead, he speaks darkly of meetings between Mr Putin and various nationalist parties of the anti-immigration sort, which left-wing 1968 types like to call ‘fascist’ long after George Orwell rightly dismissed the word as having no real meaning. Once again I reproduce his words from ‘Politics and the English Language’ : ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. This is even more true than it was when Orwell first wrote it in 1946, and I am amazed at the number of members of my trade who are either unaware of it (which is shameful), or who ignore it (which is lazy).

I agree that this is itself interesting, though I have to say that I personally wouldn’t give the time of day to any of these nationalist formations, and I would add such meetings to my criticism of Mr Putin. But it’s interesting because it does tend to underline my point that what separates Mr Putin from any other major political figure is that he is a supporter of national sovereignty. It is the single characteristic of the man which separates him from all other major figures in world politics. Others are despots. Others run corrupt states. Others are secretive. None defends sovereignty. And modern euro-politics has turned sovereignty( see below) from a mainstream opinion to an eccentric heresy.

This, above and beyond all things, is what really riles the forces of Blairism and Murdochism, in whose newspaper Mr Boyes writes. They are revolutionary internationalists, open-borders enthusiasts, scornful of national sovereignty , of protection of national industries and of immigration control. They search for pretexts to invade and overthrow states of which they do not approve, for whatever reason.

That is why (and they never answer this point) they were quite happy to put up with the gross misbehaviour of Boris Yeltsin, from rigged elections to shelling his own parliament to savage war against the Chechens. This of course is because Mr Yeltsin let the ‘West’ plunder his country without restraint, and because he did not get in the way of its various Blairite adventures.

But they won’t forgive Vladimir Putin for sins which are in many cases rather smaller. I am told this is ‘whataboutery’ , whatever that is. Well, if it is, then ‘whataboutery’ is a very powerful argument, just as ‘Tu quoque’ (‘You did it too’) has always been. If you claim to act out of principle, and you can be shown not to be doing so, then your claim is destroyed. And a principle, by its nature, applies in all cases. I am sorry I need to explain this, but it seems necessary. If you attack Mr Putin , the questions ‘Why then do you not similarly attack Messrs Yeltsin, Erdogan, Sisi, Xi Jinping for the same faults?’ must be answered. In fact can I put in here a very loud plea for someone to say *something* about Egypt, the last place where all right-minded people naively backed the Utopian mob, so plunging a moderately unhappy country into the pit of misery and hysterical repression where it now wallows, uncriticised by us.

The answer may lie in words written by Zbigniew Brzezinski( Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and the unsung architect of Moscow’s doomed intervention and eventual downfall in Afghanistan. He wrote in his 1997 book ‘The Grand Chessboard’ : ‘Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

‘However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.’

I have no doubt that similar words could be found (if we could read them) in the textbooks studied by trainee Russian diplomats, at the great elite MGIMO university on Vernadsky Prospect in Moscow.

Machine-gunning the Russian President with words such as ‘Faustian’ ‘Far Right’, ‘macho’ and Mussolini is no substitute for a grown-up analysis. Nor does it begin to cope with the problem of Russia, a huge and important country, released from its Soviet prison and trying to find its place in a world utterly different from the one in which it last existed.

Remember, when the Russian empire fell, the German, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires still existed, not to mention the British and French global empires. But Russia, even without Ukraine, remains one of the biggest land empires in human history. It has a huge task of repair, recovery and rebuilding, moral as well as physical. It will look at the world in ways different from ours a bankrupt empire turned into a client of another empire, and largely ruled by yet another empire. And who is to say it is wrong to do so?

In a little-noticed but fascinating story in which Vladimir Putin resisted both threats and inducements, from the country which has the *real* special relationship with the USA, to drop support for Syria. One explanation for this behaviour might be, er principle, even if in the end it is a self-serving one (for without sovereignty, Russia can expect to become a globally-run oilfield and source of cheap labour, much of its territory surrendered de facto to the EU and to China.). But the Putin of the caricature couldn’t possibly possess such a quality, could he?

What I find most interesting is that a desire for national sovereignty, which I was brought up to believe was normal, creditable and sensible, even desirable, has now been relegated to being a disreputable fringe position, held only by dodgy Poujadist parties. By the same principle, patriotism has become a form of bigotry, and mild social democracy, a mixed economy, reasonably strong trades unions, protection of strategic industries from foreign purchase or competition, have apparently become comparable with Venezuelan Communism.

It makes no sense to me. I must have been away when they held the briefing, which is why I still don’t think that Mr Putin is a modern Mussolini. He is just what he is, and needs to be understood as such.

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24 April 2014 1:25 PM

Mark Jaremko says ‘I wish Mr. Hitchens would stop with his rambling of "Ukraine has to culture". ‘

I am assuming he means to write “Ukraine has no culture”. He places this sentence in quotation marks, as if I had said it. But what I said was quite distinct. I said it had ‘that it has no *common* language or culture, a completely different thing. I have no doubt there is a Ukrainian culture. But it is not shared by a large minority of the citizens of Ukraine. Misrepresentations of this kind are very unhelpful to rational discussion.

‘Phil W’ says, oddly : ‘The pertinent fact about Hitler was that he was a direct threat to Britain itself as he subsequently proved by invading France, almost destroying the BEF, and then bombing our major cities for several months.’

That doesn’t show that Hitler was any threat to Britain. It is a wholly logic-free and unhistorical assertion. What was the BEF doing in France at all? Why was Britain at war with Germany? By Hitler’s choice? No, by the choice of Britain’s own incompetent government which (allegedly in defence of the ‘balance of power’ in Europe) succeeded mainly in stimulating an unprecedented alliance between the two major European powers(Balance?)

It shows that, once Britain had declared war on Germany, and sent its tiny, ill-equipped army to sit next to the French army, Hitler felt the need (no great surprise there) to engage and if possible destroy British armed forces, and to knock Britain out of the war. Had we not made our incomprehensible and dishonest guarantee to Poland, there is no reason to believe that Hitler would have attacked Britain then or later. He simply wasn’t that interested in us. Indeed that guarantee pretty much precipitated the events which led to the invasion of Poland, a wholly avoidable event. Britain has never , except from 1916-18, been a major European military power. Hitler’s interests were in the East. His only concern with France was that she might attack him in the rear while he was pursuing his eastern ambitions. France’s declaration of war gave him the pretext for what would otherwise have been a unprovoked attack, a politically and diplomatically difficult and dangerous thing to make against a major nation.

My automatic critic ‘Bert’ has spoken again (though it is not, alas, to explain to us why British rubbish collections have not been affected by the EU Landfill Directive, but have been revolutionised by some other force, of whose existence he is certain but which he cannot name and or describe – and they say Faith is Dead).

This time he has automatically disagreed with me about the Schengen agreement, thus : ‘Peter Hitchens’ equation of the Schengen Agreement with the aims of WW2 is bizarre. I suspect that most people – here as much as in Europe – are delighted that they can move around the continent without the faff of showing passports etc. I doubt very much that they see connect this with German or Russian tanks blasting across cowering countries. (As somebody, I think, pointed out on another thread, the whole notion of border controls is a relatively recent invention anyway.) It seems to be yet another manifestation of Hitchens’ visceral hatred for all things connected with the EU.’

I am grateful to him for giving the opportunity to expand on this. Schengen does not simply abolish passport controls ( I have still been unable to find any further details about a reader’s suggestion that this was done for a while in parts of the continent before 1914. Border controls were far from unknown in 18th and 19th century Europe. None of my vintage guide books substantiate the pre-1914 passport abolition theory, as they often contain detailed instructions of what to expect at the customs sheds of various nations. Perhaps passports were not required, though the number of travellers was very much smaller and they were generally ‘respectable’ and well-off, so countries had little reason to fear that they would become a burden on them.. Lengthy and thorough luggage inspections certainly were still required).

It abolishes frontiers *as such*. Frontiers are the boundaries of legal systems, military and police operations, trade, in short of the hard attributes of sovereignty. Without them no country is sovereign.

You can (I have) simply walk across the Rhine between Strasbourg, in France and Kehl in Germany, as if you were walking from Goring in Oxfordshire to Streatley in Berkshire . You can do the same between Aachen in Germany and Vaals in the Netherlands, only in that case there is not even a river, or any other sign that you have crossed from one jurisdiction into another, unless you are very observant indeed. The same’s true between Germany and the Czech Republic in the Elbe gorge, between Austria and Italy at the Brenner pass, between Germany and Poland at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder and Slubice . And if you fly to a British (or Irish) destination from any Schengen airport, you’ll find yourself corralled in a small, cramped zone separate from the rest of the airport, to punish you for belonging to a country which still more or less insists on observing the formalities of a frontier. The Irish Republic would of course much prefer to join Schengen, but cannot really do so without raising awkward issues about the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, which Dublin does not genuinely recognise. If Dublin joined Schengen and London stayed out, that border would have to be marked and patrolled by both sides.

Though ‘formalities’ is the word. Possessors of EU passports cannot in reality be stopped from passing through our border ‘controls’. But the British public are still largely unaware of the fact that they have no more right of entry to Britain than does a KGB pensioner from Tallinn. Most don’t even realise that their passports are EU documents, not British ones.

Now, Bert says that my ‘equation’ (not in my view the apposite word, I would say ‘comparison’. The whole point is that it much easier to do these things by treaty than by force, precisely because so few people will see the significance, or even notice it ) between Schengen and German war aims is ‘bizarre’.

Why is it ‘bizarre’

Is it not rather more ‘bizarre’ to pretend that the two have no connection, as it is to pretend that the EU does not have a remarkable congruence with German diplomatic aims openly expressed for almost a century, from the September Programme of 1914 to Friedrich Naumann’s slightly later dream of ‘Mitteleuropa’. Naumann was not a militarist or Nazi, but a conscientious and civilised liberal. The Hitler era blinds people to the fact that many of his policies were in fact pioneered by( and supported by) civilised Germans

To mention these things is always to be accused of making ‘xenophobic’ attacks upon the new liberal Germany, and of absurd comparisons between Herman van Rompuy and Hitler.

The accusations are false. I make so no such claims. It’s a simple matter of fact that Germany has always achieved power through customs and currency unions (which entail abolition of borders) has a strong economic, political and strategic interest in gaining some sort of hegemony over Ukraine, the Baltic coast and the Caucasus. Why does the EU have to be supranational rather than multinational? Because it requires the cession of sovereignty by its members to a central authority? Why does ti require this? because it is a political entity, requiring all the characteristics of such an entity (free movement of goods and persons within, an external border which is enforced, a common currency, a common bank, common foreign policy, common military strategy etc.).

As Germany dominates the EU economically and politically, geographically and in terms of population, it is no great surprise if the EU takes on German characteristics.

I like Germany, I understand that its size and power mean that it must dominate continental Europe and I am happy for it to do so. If France wishes to cohabit as subservient partner with its former occupier, then what is that to me? Britain has wasted quite enough blood and treasure trying to maintain the hopeless imbalance of power which existed between France and Germany, and which could only ever have ended one way.

Those who study photographs and newsreels of events such as the Anschluss and the invasion by Germany of Poland in 1939 and of the Low Countries in 1940 will note how many of them show German troops destroying frontier barriers or crashing through border posts. Why did they do that? Because the deliberate destruction of another country’s frontier is the most undeniable violation of its sovereignty. So much more sensible, and irreversible, to do it by means of treaties than by means of tanks. As I keep saying, the EU is the continuation of war by other means.

And what is this allegedly ‘visceral’; ‘hatred’ of the EU, of which I am accused by ‘Bert’ . I do not ‘hate’ the EU. I am happy for it to exist, though do not wish my own country to belong to it. My objection to British membership of the EU, and my objections to its policy in Ukraine, come from my organs of reason, not from my organs of digestion. Can the same be said of the automatic and unvarying objections of ‘Bert’ to all my articles?

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23 April 2014 1:27 PM

I think any historian looking back on this period will see the Ukraine crisis as by far the most significant event of the time. So I have no hesitation in returning to it, as my first offering on returning from my involuntary disappearance from the Internet .

And I think my own trade is doing a lot of damage by failing to understand or explain what is going on. I was dispirited, for instance, by Hugh Muir’s selection of items on Ukraine in last Sunday’s ‘What the Papers Say’ on BBC Radio 4. The ‘Guardian’ writer, while giving long quotations of descriptions of events, also quoted only analysts (Edward Lucas and Janet Daley) who supported the ‘New Cold War’ view and ending by quoting yet another dim article comparing Vladimir Putin with Adolf Hitler.

Sure, some people genuinely do think that this ignorant, unhistorical, crude, misleading and frankly dangerous comparison is valid and useful. They deserve airtime, not least because there are so many of them, as one might expected in our poorly-educated society. But there is another view, which has been expressed by several people including me, and you wouldn’t have known from Mr Muir’s selection (still available here for a few days http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0414rsb ) that such a view even existed. Shouldn’t a review of the papers have at least given some mention to the dissenting position? To its considerable credit, Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ has for some time (after a poor start) been a model of proper impartiality on this, giving ample airtime to genuine experts on both sides who disagree on this matter, and leaving it to the listener to form his or her opinions. Whenever it happens, I almost weep with nostalgic joy, for it reminds me of the old long lost World Service to which I would listen in Weimar, Prague and Moscow on the crackling, elusive short wave - ‘The Truth, Read by Gentlemen’, as it was once described, though among the gentlemen there was also the evocative voice of Pamela Creighton, bursting with intelligence and so English you can almost see the meadows and woodlands (you can hear clips from those days here http://andywalmsley.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/this-is-london-world-service-memories.html

(scroll down) .

You will even hear the (now-abolished) station signature ‘Lilliburlerlo’, the song that drove James II out of Ireland, and thus impossibly Unionist, British, patriotic, Protestant and ‘outdated’. A truncated, blandified version was used until a few years ago but appears to have vanished. Note that it's always 'Greenwich Mean Time', observe the use of language as carefully-separated words pronounced with care and the scrupulous attribution to others of any claim which the BBC has not itself been able to verify (an absolute rule at that time).

By the way, listeners to today's BBC and readers of the mainstream press in Britain might be forgiven for thinking that the Geneva accords agreed between Russia, the USA and the EU (plus the Ukrainian junta installed by the mob) only applied to Russian-speaking separatists in the east of the country, who have plainly not taken any notice of the agreement.

Well, it’s quite true that they haven’t taken any notice, and indeed it is not clear how Russia could make them observe it anyway, short of actually sending in the troops that it is said to be massing on the frontier. Though I personally have no doubt that Russia has been fomenting a lot of this, it is notoriously harder to rein in such things than it is to start them, and it may genuinely be the case that some Russian speakers in places such as Slavyansk are keener or joining Russia than Russia is on having them.

But what did the agreement actually say?

This is the only text of it that I have been able to find, and it is so brief that there’s really no excuse for any media outlet not having read it in full:

‘The Geneva meeting on the situation in Ukraine agreed on initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions and restore security for all citizens.

All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-Semitism.

All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.

Amnesty will be granted to protestors and to those who have left buildings and other public places and surrendered weapons, with the exception of those found guilty of capital crimes.

It was agreed that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission should play a leading role in assisting Ukrainian authorities and local communities in the immediate implementation of these de-escalation measures wherever they are needed most, beginning in the coming days. The U.S., E.U. and Russia commit to support this mission, including by providing monitors.

The announced constitutional process will be inclusive, transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments and proposed amendments.

The participants underlined the importance of economic and financial stability in Ukraine and would be ready to discuss additional support as the above steps are implemented.’

Note the two really central sections (with my emphases added):

‘All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including anti-semitism.

All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be vacated.’

I think it is blazingly clear from this that Russia requires the ‘Maidan’ occupation in Kiev to disperse, and for the Pravy Sektor squads to be disbanded, as a quid pro quo for the dispersal of the pro-Russians in Donetsk and elsewhere.

Have you seen or heard or read *any* description of moves to do this, or to disarm and disperse such organisations as the menacing ‘Pravy Sektor’ in Kiev itself, or elsewhere in the West? Or have you seen any discussion of the fact that the agreement imposes obligations on both sides? If so, please do let me know, for I have not. I have not even seen a recent report of the state of affairs on the ‘Maidan’ . And how’s the promised inquiry going into the highly public beating, by members of the Ukraine parliament, of the TV boss Oleksandr Pantelymonov?

Now, whether the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, or his boss, Vladimir Putin, ever seriously expected the Ukrainian Junta (I use this name as a corrective to the selective use of such terms as ‘regime’ applied by mainstream media to governments of which they disapprove, especially that in Syria. If The Assad government is a ‘regime’, then how much more is that Ukrainian government, which came to power through violent mob rule, a ‘Junta’) to do anything of the kind I do not know.

Neither of these persons is exactly naïve or lacking in cynicism or calculation.

And it seems to me that the ‘West’ which has big jaws and a large appetite, but rather small teeth, may have wholly misunderstood what these accords really meant. To Russia (which has quite big teeth and much more limited and well-thought-out aims, despite the absurd caricatures of Putin as a new Hitler) , they were an official and irreversible recognition that the future of Ukraine is Russia’s legitimate business. I think that may prove very important indeed in the months to come, unless everyone completely loses their heads (as so many people seem so anxious to do).

I should have thought that the events of the past few weeks would have helped to make my point that ‘Ukraine’ as a country is a fiction. We know it has nothing truly resembling an economy or a currency, that it has no common language or culture, and now we see that it cannot physically defend itself from external or internal threats, its armed might being on one occasion quite easily overcome by a crowd of old ladies and fat men with beards. I agree that the old ladies of the former USSR, with their armour-piercing scowls, weighty handbags and extra-wide loading gauge, are not to be trifled with. But even so.

The real problem is that, in the age of supranational states, Ukraine is a throwback to the loopy idealism of Versailles, a Wilsonian state based on a nationality, but containing in its borders many people who don’t really share that nationality, and also being smack in the middle of a volatile and contested piece of territory. So, from the start it was ripe for destabilisation by neighbouring outsiders, and very likely to be subjected to it.

The only thing to be said in its favour that that this mess was created entirely by accident, rather than as an act of carefully-thought-out policy. Actually, it seems to me that any wise person would see these events not as a pretext for boarding up the doorways between Russia and the ‘West’ (as Washington seems so strangely anxious to do) but to reorder the borders so that Ukraine had more of a chance of developing into a viable entity. But to do that I think everyone would have to recognise its neutrality.

Western Europe has undone the follies of Versailles (without anyone noticing) by simply dissolving all the borders on the entire Continent, up to the River Bug. I still can’t get people to see what an astonishing thing this is, how the Treaty of Schengen ought to be ranked with those of Versailles, Potsdam, even Westphalia, as a momentous occasion. The supreme paradox of this is the borders dissolved by Schengen are the very same borders which so many young men fought and died to preserve and restore (and in which so many others died in collateral results) in the 1939-45 conflict.

The modern age makes a great fetish about the nobility of World War Two. Then it presides smilingly over an act which utterly undoes that war’s principal purpose and achievement. This is what happens when people stop thinking.

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11 July 2013 1:56 PM

Thanks to the New York Times, I’ve found out about a very strange new fact about the Euro, the supposed single currency of the nascent state of Euroland. Actually, it turns out that the Euro is not a single currency at all. The Cyprus version of the Euro is only a partial member of the Euro. It has all the disadvantages – the fixed exchange rate, set to suit others, the total lack of national control. But it lacks some of the alleged advantages. Its currency is not truly compatible with, or equal to, those of stronger members of the Euro zone. Would the US dollar be a national currency if you couldn’t transfer large sums out of, say, Louisiana, to any other state? Would the Pound Sterling be a national currency if there were restrictions on how much you could send or carry from Glasgow to Plymouth?

There are many interesting aspects to this, especially since it’s clear that the Eurofanatics have by no means abandoned their hopes that Britain will one day surrender its own currency and join the Euro (don’t rule this out. The economic and political decline of the coming decade, mainly severe inflation, will make all kinds of unthinkable things thinkable).

Cyprus (and Greece and some other countries) are still in the Euro because of political imperatives. The EU project could not be seen to be retreating. They are not in it for economic reasons, as continued membership is deeply damaging to their economies and societies.

I wonder if that other totem of Euroland, the Schengen agreement which abolishes borders, has a similar one-way capability. Will it be the case that people travelling from the core countries will be able to cross freely into the outer Eurozone, and settle there, while those in the outer zone won’t be able to settle in Germany and France?

And what about the huge problem of illegal migrants into the EU, crossing into Greece and Bulgaria from Turkey, into Italy from Albania, or into Spain via its African enclaves at Ceuta and Melilla, or arriving as boat people, from North Africa to Lampedusa and Malta, or directly into Italy? I see that Malta has a grave crisis of migration once again, having been told by the EU Commission that it cannot send boat people back to Libya, in which case I rather suspect that the migrants will be informed by someone or other that there is no border between Malta and Italy. In fact there is no border (apart from the sea) between Malta and Brussels. Only recalcitrant Britain ( joined, of necessity, by Ireland, which I suspect would like to sign up to Schengen, but can’t if we won’t) still maintains border controls within the EU. And, as we know, those controls are a good deal weaker than they should be. Although we can still check passports, we are absolutely obliged to allow the holders of EU passports to enter our territory, for they have as much right here as we do. But will the Northern European founders of the EU be limitlessly willing to accommodate these migrants? And if not, what then will happen to Schengen?

I myself think the Schengen Treaty is a bigger and more revolutionary enterprise even than the Euro, and I still gulp with amazement at such locations as the Brenner pass, that ancient boundary between north and south, when I go from Austria to Italy without so much as a pause, or at the footbridge over the Rhine between Strasbourg and Kehl, which can be crossed without a passport, as if I were crossing the Cherwell from North Oxford to East Oxford (yes, this is how geography works in Alice in Wonderland's home town) , or when I rattle in the Prague Express down the lovely Elbe Valley south of Dresden, and suddenly I am in the Czech republic without so much as an application of the brakes, only able to tell which country I am in by the signboards on the shops and bars.

Abolishing borders isn’t quite like abolishing gravity. If you don’t have passport checks and customs, then people can physically cross them (I note that on those sleeper trains I used to take, that I wrote about here a little while back, you’d have to give your passport to the attendant the night before, and sometimes you’d be woken anyway, and if you were travelling eastwards, they’d wake you for sure at Warsaw Pact frontiers) . But it *is* like abolishing history, pretending that things are true which are not true, and that things are not true which are true.

After all, a simple reading of the history of World War Two, the supposedly virtuous war, begins (does it not?), with the violation of borders, first of Czechoslovakia, then of Poland, then of Belgium and Holland and France. So presumably it was fought by us and our allies to restore these borders, not to render them permanently obsolete? In which case why have they now vanished? I might add, for those who keep telling me that we were obliged to go to war in 1914 to guarantee the integrity of Belgium, that if the German Army decided to go to Brussels or Liege today, on their way to Paris, all they’d need to do would be to get on the train and go there. So where did they put that integrity?

Ah, reply the EU supporters, but Schengen did not result from invasion, but an agreement between equals. Maybe so. I think you would have to study, in some detail, the mathematics of each border to work out if the countries on either side of it really were equals. Which way do trade, and money and people flow? Which way does power flow? Which country’s foreign policy is subject to which? In easy times, these things aren’t tested, though EU membership has devastated – for instance – coal mining and farming in Poland, deep-sea fishing in this country, and is I think about to do grave damage to agriculture in newly-joined Croatia. In difficult times, of unemployment and mass immigration, they are tested. I suspect we’ll see more and more of the sort of one-way unity they are suffering in Cyprus.

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22 December 2007 5:08 PM

Almost silently, a disaster happened across the European continent on Thursday night. It will affect us profoundly and – as long as we are governed by Labour or the Tories – nothing will be done about it.

Hundreds of miles of frontiers were torn down. There is now no border control anywhere between the Channel Tunnel and the Balkans.

Put it another way. If you can slip from Ukraine into Slovakia, from Russia into the Baltic states, from Belarus into Poland or across the Mediterranean into Italy, then you are free to roam at will across the entire landmass.

Glance at a map to see what this means.

You are also free to obtain – all too easily in some places – a convincing faked EU passport. This will allow you automatic entrance to and, in effect, the right of residence in this country, one of the last to have its own frontier controls – though for how long?

It may seem strange to you that this extraordinary abandonment of a simple, effective means of hampering the movements of terrorists and criminals should have taken place just when we are being threatened with identity cards and snooped on by the most advanced system of privacy-breaching surveillance ever to exist outside science fiction. It seems strange to me, too.

But the European Union, now the true government of the territories formerly known as Britain, is utterly dedicated to what it calls 'free movement'.

This, in fact, means unfettered immigration, a vast human reservoir of cheap, exploitable labour ready to rush wherever it is needed, to keep wages low, regardless of the effects this may haveon human happiness, on settled communities or on those who are sent trudging hither and thither from sweatshop to fruit farm, living in overcrowded slums and separated from their homesand families.

I have no idea if the architects of the 1985 Schengen Agreement – which is the root of this – actually intended any such result.

For all I know, they simply signed it with tears of joy in their eyes at the thought that they had at last begun to create a sort of Star Trek paradise of a 'world without borders', one of those ideas that sounds terrific until you find out what it means in practice.

And I don't much care if it isn't what they wanted, because it is what we have got anyway. What I am sure of is that, as long as Britain remains a member of the EU, it will be under relentless pressure to join this agreement in full, and will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the threadbare controls it still possesses.

The abolition of this country, especially all the good things about it, continues apace. Will nobody act to stop it?

The silly cult of Nelson Mandela looks even sillier today, now that Comrade Mandela's beloved ANC has picked the awful Jacob Zuma as its new leader and probably the next Presidentof South Africa.

Even the most dedicated liberals can find little good to say about Mr Zuma, an enthusiast for machine guns and unprotected sex who is constantly assailed with corruption charges.

He makes the wooden Thabo Mbeki look good, though Comrade Mbeki is, of course, one of the mainstays of Robert Mugabe.

Nelson Mandela, no doubt a fine gentleman, provided a fig leaf for the ANC and for characters like these (and not by accident – remember his liking for ghastly figures such as Colonel Gaddafi and Fidel Castro?). He must be judged, in the end, by the final outcome of the ANC revolution. I do not think it will be especially good. Kindly send back that halo.

John Major (I never thought I'd say this) is very nearly right about sleaze. The ridiculous sheep-like attack on his government by the flock of political journalists in themid-Nineties was absurd.

A few sexual peccadilloes and a few brown envelopes were elevated into huge scandals, which they weren't.

The Major government – which was very much what a David Cameron government would be like if we were ever unlucky enough to suffer one – was dreadful. It was pro-crime, pro-PC, anti-education, pro-EU, and it eviscerated the Armed Forces – just like the Blair-Brown regime that followed.

But rather than discuss these important issues, we went into the 1997 Election on an emotional spasm, which ensured that nothing important was discussed. That is why nothing changed and we got New Labour, which was John Major with go-faster stripes on it.

The political journalists, always more interested in gossip than in the future of the country, are now trying the same trick on Gordon Brown, and have entirely given up scrutiny of the Tories. Who'd know that David Cameron has just had to give back two illegal donations to his Witney constituency party, or that he has been entangled in a serious disagreement with John Redwood on what constitutes rape?

As for the opinion polls, supposedly showing a surging Tory lead, it isn't quite like that if you study the figures.

* The new leader of the 'Liberal Democrats', Nicholas Clegg, says he doesn't believe in God. Well, I don't believe in Mr Clegg. Since he claims to favour social mobility and simultaneously heads a party that hates grammar schools, he is obviously a physical and mental impossibility.Or bottomlessly stupid.

* A month ago I suggested that the childminder Keran Henderson had been wrongly convicted of killing a little girl in her charge. I predicted she would be freed on appeal. Now, two of the jurors and one of the witnesses have spoken out against the conviction. Good. If we didn't have majority verdicts, introduced on feeble grounds by Roy Jenkins 40 years ago, Mrs Henderson would now be where she should be – at home with her children. We should go back to unanimous verdicts, and soon.

* Cherie Blair (as she calls herself in the USA) has written an article for the New York Times about the plight of widows. A pity it doesn't mention her own husband's abolition of the widow's pension, which has left many widows facing harsh and humiliating conditions in this country.

* Jack Straw, who recently rightly derided people for sending Christmas cards containing the bland, de-Christianised words 'Season's Greetings', should have a word with the Labour Party, which madly sent me ane-card on Thursday wishing me 'Season's Greetings'.Well, in the week when Mohammed was revealed as the country's second-most popular boy's name, this column is still prepared to wish all its readers a very Happy Christmas.